Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [105]
Miss Fulkes read the sentence through; but before she had come to the end of it, she had forgotten what the beginning was about. She began again;…’for want of the opportunity to exchange all that surplus…(I could take the sleeves out of my brown dress, she was thinking; because it’s only under the arms that it’s begun to go, and wear it for the skirt only with a jumper over it)…over and above his own consumption for such parts…(an orange jumper perhaps).’ She tried a third time, reading the words out aloud. ‘When the market is very small…’ A vision of the cattle market at Oxford floated before her inward eye; it was quite a large market. ‘No person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself…’ What was it all about? Miss Fulkes suddenly rebelled against her own conscientiousness. She hated the highest when she saw it. Getting up, she put The Wealth of Nations back on the shelf. It was a row of very high books—’my treasures,’ she called them. Wordsworth, Longfellow, and Tennyson bound in squashy leather and looking, with their rounded corners and Gothic titles, like so many Bibles. Sartor Resartus, also Emerson’s Essays. Marcus Aurelius in one of those limp leathery artistic little editions that one gives, at Christmas, and in sheer despair, to those to whom one can think of nothing more suitable to give. Macaulay’s History. Thomas a Kempis, Mrs. Browning. Miss Fulkes did not select any of them. She put her hand behind the best that has beenr thought or said and withdrew from its secret place a copy of The Mystery of the Castlemaine Emeralds. A ribbon marked her place. She opened and began to read. ‘Lady Kitty turned on the lights and walked in. A cry of horror broke from her lips, a sudden faintness almost overcame her. In the middle of the room lay the body of a man in faultless evening dress. The face was almost unrecognizably mangled; there was a red gash in the white shirt front. The rich Turkey carpet was darkly soaked with blood…’ Miss Fulkes read on, avidly. The thunder of the gong brought her back with a start from the world of emeralds and murder. She sprang up. ‘I ought to have kept an eye on the time,’ she thought, feeling guilty. ‘We shall be late.’ Pushing The Mystery of the Castlemaine Emeralds back into its place behind the best that has been thought or said, she hurried along to the night nursery. Little Phil had to be washed and brushed.
There was no breeze except the wind of the ship’s own speed; and that was like a blast from the engine-room. Stretched in their chairs Philip and Elinor watched the gradual diminution against the sty of a jagged island of bare red rock. From the deck above came the sound of people playing shuffle-board. Walking on principle or for an appetite their fellow passengers passed and re-passed with the predictable regularity of comets.
‘The way people take exercise,’ said Elinor in a tone positively of resentment; it made her hot to look at them. ‘Even in the Red Sea.’
‘It explains the British Empire,’ he said.
There was a silence. Burnt brown, burnt scarlet, the young men on leave passed laughing, four to a girl. Sun-dried and curry-pickled veterans of the East strolled by with acrimonious words; about the Reforms and the cost of Indian living, upon their lips. Two female missionaries padded past in a rarely broken silence. The French globe-trotters reacted to the oppressively imperial atmosphere by talking very loud. The Indian students slapped one another on the back like stage subalterns